Odds & Ends

A player for the Tugun Seahawks rugby team received an 8-game suspension for biting an opponent’s penis during a game earlier this month. According to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Anthony Watts was found guilty of a “contrary conduct” charge during a Gold Coast Rugby League hearing last Tuesday. Watts denied any genital biting took place, but footage of the incident was enough to convince league officials. The opposing player even dropped his trunks on the field to show his injury to referees. This is only the latest violent incident for Watts who has admitted to joining the outlawed Finks motorcycle gang since moving to the Gold Coast.

Dateline: Australia

According to campers in Western Australia, a sauced-up swine stole 18 beers, got into a fight with a cow and passed out on a riverbank. A camper at the DeGrey River campsite near Port Hedland told ABC Australia, “It was the middle of the night and it was these people camping opposite us and they heard this crunching of the can and they got their torch out and shone it on the pig and there he was scrunching away on their cans.” The feral pig is believed to have downed three six-packs’ worth of beer before raiding a nearby trash bin for munchies. Later on in the evening, eyewitnesses said, “there was some other people camped right on the river and they saw him running around their vehicle being chased by a cow. It was going around and around and then it went into the river and swam across to the middle of the river.” What the pig had done to piss off the innocent cow was not made clear. The pixilated porker “was last seen near the river itself, under a tree,” Western Australia Main Roads spokesperson Fionna Findley told reporters. “I think it’s nursing its head today.”

Dateline: Hawaii

Hawaii’s Department of Transportation has stirred up a controversy by asking Janice Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele to shorten or change her name because it’s too long to fit on county-issued driver’s licenses. For the past 20 years, Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele has had to carry two ID cards—a state ID and a driver’s license—because the county has had to shorten her last name by one letter and omit her first and middle names in order to fit it on the driver’s license. Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele told KHON2 News about a recent traffic stop in which the police officer complained about the license’s omissions. “I said, ‘Don’t blame me. This is your department,’” said the disgruntled driver. In the past the governor’s office made a special adjustment to accommodate Mrs. K.’s full name on the state ID, but when that expired in May, her new ID came back incomplete just like her county driver’s license. According to Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele, the county has asked her to go back to her maiden name or shorten her last name. She has, however, refused to shed any of her dead husband’s name. “How disrespectful to the Hawaiian people,” she told KHON2. Department of Transportation officials say they are now working to extend the current 34-character limit on names.

Dateline: California

A student at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego is suing the school because they say he has to retake a class he failed in order to graduate. Ironically the class in question is Civil Procedure—which teaches students how to file lawsuits. According to abovethelaw.com, third year law student Jackson Milkman was told he’d have to retake Legal Writing and Civil Procedure after obtaining a D in the class. However after going off to his summer internship, Milkman didn’t hear any more on the subject and assumed he no longer had to retake the class. “Given Mr. Milkman’s success in both academics and the practice of law, he took the familiar TJSL silence to mean acquiescence in suspending the re-enrollment policy,” is how Milkman’s lawsuit put it. No such luck. Milkman was automatically re-enrolled in the Civil Procedure class for the fall semester, which really ticked him off because “it did not fit the schedule he had already begun to build.” Unwilling to do all that tedious classwork, Milkman instead wrote a 60-paragraph legal complaint and is suing the school for “reputational harm.”